S PIRITUAL DIREC TIONS: HO N O R AT S TA K E
Continued from page 20
When schools, when student bodies, have so-called “honor” codes, I think, they do so not
because they want to focus the students’ minds on the reputation that is being pledged—that
is, on “honor”—but rather because they want them to think deeply about what it is pledged
for: character, what you really are, “integrity.” The advantage of talking about integrity—the
internal ideal of behavior—is, it seems to me, the fact that it connects naturally to the internal
source of moral decision, that is, conscience.
In my own tradition, the fundamental rule of moral decision making is that the informed
conscience must be obeyed. I was ordained a deacon on the feast of Thomas Cranmer (14891556), who was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the English Reformation. Tried as a
traitor and then as a heretic by Queen Mary, he made a series of recantations, each one more
abject, over the first months of 1556, but the queen would accept none of them. In a final
speech on March 21, meant to be a public confirmation of the earlier written statements,
Cranmer instead recovered his conscience, rejected his earlier recantations, and announced
that when he was taken to the stake, he would make his right hand—with which the recantations had been signed—the first part to be burned (referring to Matthew 5:30, “Also yf thy
right honde offende the, cut hym of, and cast him from the,” in the words of the Great Bible of
1539). And so he did. It was as dishonorable a death as the queen and church could arrange:
but it was, in the end, a recovery of the old man’s integrity. l
The Rev. John Houghton is chaplain at The Hill School in Pottstown,
Pennsylvania, where he is also chair of
the Department of Religious Studies.
He is the author of Tolkien in the New
Century (2014) and Rough Magicke
(2005); Its sequel, Like a Noise in
Dreams, will be out Spring 2015. He can
be reached at [email protected].
Page 24 Winter 2014
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